(3) "Guilty men, whose own strength is their god" (Habakkuk 1:11).
(4) It's a city where people sacrifice family for money, where lust is confused with love, where weekends and vacations are lived for self, where everyone is too busy for "religion". [p.155]
Even though, all four of these statements appear to describe the approach Americans have witnessed to governance by the Republican Neo-Con clan since 2001, the author Jacoby painfully used jargon pre-W. Bush American Christians in writing, "We too must watch ourselves lest we become too humanistic."[p. 155]
Why did Jacoby repeatedly state that the enemy at Babel was "humanism"? Was he trying to please a certain faction of Christianity? I hope not, but that is the way it appears looking back ten years later and after Jacoby wrote much more critical pieces in other areas of research, critical essays, and discussion.
On the other hand, perhaps 1990s America had hoodwinked Jacoby into misreading the muse of history and the spirit of biblical narration. Jacoby called Babel the place of "The Infernal Tower".
That means it is a place of the damned-kind of like many now living, fighting, struggling, and dying in Iraq and other wars.
Jacoby warned readers, "Babel was the infernal tower. Its ego was inflated so large that its field of vision was totally blocked; it did not see God, arms outstretched, pleading. In unmitigated pride it embodied the spirit of the age, having forgotten the truth about the past and refusing to consider the truth about the future. It promised everything, but delivered nothing. In pretense it reached towards the heavens, but its true foundations were in hell." [p. 158]
By the time I had read these lines summing up what the story of Babel and its tower meant to Ibrahamic Faiths, I could see that in the first decade of the 21st century those words written by Jacoby (a decade earlier)and the projects and plans of men in Babylon today now pointed the finger of Babylonian witness at the strange coalition of Christians who considered humanism the enemy-rather than the follies against God and against the will of God or the desires of God for man as the really of their faiths.
These Christians had agreed to blind themselves to the facts on the ground which showed that the plans of the Neo-cons and others in the executive branch leadership did not serve either the will of God nor the American people. The crimes against humanity done in their name should call all involved to search their souls and to end the pretense of the enemy as being (1) someone who hates America or the enemy being someone (2) who is humanist.
The enemy is found sometimes in the sort of unity we seek with and in groupings with others.
Do we ignore God's out-stretched arms to build a better world for current and subsequent generations? Or do we ignore his commands to do it on our own? I.e. Do we serve ourselves and undertake big projects and wars on behalf of God?--Or simply for mammon, fame, so-called security, and profit?
JACOBY AND CULTURE WARS
To be fair to Douglas Jacoby, he does ask many of the right questions in 1997 when he wrote this particular study of Genesis. Jacoby asks his students:
(1) Do we hunger for honor and recognition? Do we seek to make a name for ourselves?
(2) Are we easily flattered? Do we feel ourselves influenced by the "sophisticated"?
(3) Do we cringe when someone else gets credit for something we have done?
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